Been focusing a lot more on planning for my 4th grader....but here's what I think for my 2nd grader: Finish OPGTR AAS 1, then 2 Lots of reading Writing projects like the ones in Bravewriter's Jot It Down Follow along with big brother's US History and incorporate some of it into writing Books and docs on earth science with a project at the end of the year TT 3, then 4 for math....maybe start Beast at some point next year? (She's already a quarter of the way through TT3) Either Spanish or Latin Oh, and the MP Greek Alphabet (big brother wants to do this and she's been begging to do it too. We'll see if it lasts!) I also have not doing enough syndrome after looking here but I think my bug will function quite well with this list.

My 9YO has loved Prima Latina and Latina Christiana and loves the looks of First Form Latin. We are going to use Rosetta Stone but that provides a very different experience. He really wants something like the way he's been learning Latin. Are there any curriculums like that for Spanish?

I meant a separate English grammar program. Latin has a lot of English grammar in it so I was wondering what others thought. :001_rolleyes:

I'm just wondering. We are working through Latina Christiana and will be transitioning to FFL about a fourth of the way into his 4th grade year. There's a lot of grammar there. Does he still need separate grammar? What sayeth the Hive?

I understood her to mean that in Belgium even kids who are focused on STEM related learning are required to learn 3 languages. Other focuses would mean more languages. She can correct me if I'm wrong. As for why Belgium requires that for STEM, you'd probably have to ask their government. :laugh:

My DS, 9, has been studying Latin for 2 years. He loves it. Next year, he wants to add Greek (which would really just be the alphabet), Spanish, and Chinese. :huh: I am considering drawing the line at Chinese. After all there are only so many hours in a day and I feel COMPLETELY out of my depth with Chinese and only MOSTLY out of my depth with the others (I actually took Greek in college so maybe it will come back to me? Here's hoping :lol: ). But he wants to just keep adding and adding. He's been talking about this for year. My 7YO DD, taking after he brother, has no real interest in Latin, but also REALLY wants to learn Chinese and Spanish too. Any suggestions for managing this foreign language hunger well while keeping it perspective educationally? I would love any advice at all.

Cornell has a home study on ornithology. It's aimed at adults but I am going to work through it with my 9YO. I've had it for a while and I think it is really in depth and we are going to add some fun stuff and list keeping and more. I have a plan if you are interested.

Here is what I am thinking...we were having a lot of trouble and I was so worried about his reading and while he is still slow and it is WORK for him, I think he is fine. Consistency, it turns out, works wonders. :laugh: Here is my plan as of now: Math: Teaching Textbooks 5 Spelling: Phonetic Zoo Writing: IEW Narnia theme Latin: First Form Latin Greek: MP Greek Alphabet History: US History using Hakim as a spine and lots of read alouds and a few assigned readers with lots of IEW inspired writing Science: Still working on this - I think we are going to do an overview of science history using Hakim and Bill Bryson's book to give DS a broad exposure and zeroing in on a few things to really research. Right now he is doing a project on black holes and I think we will continue with a monthly project stemming from our larger reading. Reading: Free reading time each day plus assignments from Narnia, history, and science I'm pretty excited now that things are better with him. Now for what to do with my 2nd grader who is as different as could be from her brother!

He has not achieved reading speed yet but I had him read the first few pages of the Magician's Nephew to me today (he loves the Narnia books) and he knew all the words. He doesn't like to write because he doesn't really know what to do and his hand get tired. I thought that he would enjoy a slow intro to IEW via Narnia rather than SWI which would be boring, I think, to him.

Do you think this could be used at a slower pace with a 4th grader?

What is LLfLOTR? Well, just the LL part; I got the LOTR part. ;)

...what else might we like? I have a 7 and 9 year old and we loved the puzzle solving as we went along, the personalities of the characters (both male and female), and the funny stuff. Any ideas?

Wow. Wow. Wow. You all have been super supportive. I expected some judgement at least for not being rigorous enough. But it is fostering her love of writing, very simple research, writing, spelling, etc. Huh. Well then, to repay you for the kind words, here is the full dictated-to-me-by-her entry on Mirkwood Spiders. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did! "One of the many things about Mirkwood Spiders is that you can always tell the difference between their webs and other spiders' webs. There are three main reasons why you can tell. Mirkwood Spiders' webs are dark and grayish, but normal spider webs are perfectly clear and skinny. And their patterns are different. A Mirkwood Spider's web pattern is straight but on the very outside it goes sideways. These particularly large spiders are incredibly dangerous. Their favorite things to eat are dwarves, humans, and full grown bears. Given the advantage that they are bigger, first they will dangle their long, thick threads down from the large Mirkwood trees. Then their prey gets stuck to the rope. Then they wrap the thread around you and pull up. Then they wrap you around with their spider web and leave only your nose and the very tips of your toes sticking out. They hang you there for at least two weeks. Then they unwrap you and pinch you to see which part of you they should eat first. Their fangs are one of the sharpest things that exist on earth, in fact it's probably the sharpest. These spiders do not suck blood, they eat your lungs, skin, and heart and leave the rest lying around. " :lol: :lol:

I wanted to vote for cupcakes and kilts and have no idea why! Anyway, we got Darwin but no Big Bang at all. For whatever that's worth. Grew up in Southern Baptist, USA and now I believe there is only Creationism taught now at my award winning college prep public school.

not using any writing curriculum for my 1st grader? Instead, at this moment, we are working on making a book on the Creatures of Middle Earth. Today she wrote on a page, "Mirkwood Spiders" as the title and then, "As with all spiders, these uncommonly spooky spiders have eight legs." Actually, she dictated those, I wrote them, then she copied them. Now she is drawing a picture. Then she is going to dictate probably a page long, almost certainly very stream-of-thought summary of their habits and life for me to write down. And we are going to keep doing this for orcs, trolls, dragons, ents, and on and on for a month. :001_rolleyes: I feel kind of guilty that we are doing something so laid back and some other homeschool mom asked me yesterday what curriculum I was using with her. I felt very sheepish. Assuage my mommy guilt, please, or else help motivate me to greater writing work for her! :lol:

Wow wow wow. So much wisdom and good advice. Monday (today) is our Saturday because my husband is home today and not Saturday so tomorrow starts our new school week. So I will be doing some planning today and talking with my kiddos about expectations. I expect that I am in for a rough week. But I think you all are right and the long term will be much better. I think no screen time at all before school. DS loves audiobooks and he can listen to those or whatever or we can start school. He gets up around 7. I suppose I will start getting up at 5 so I can finish my quiet time before he gets up. And then when he does, he can do stuff on his own or maybe start some work with me. I like the idea of people getting their own breakfasts but then we have some morning time to come together. I think this will be a tough week but better for all of us ultimately. I really resonated with whoever said that falling apart is often a symptom of needing more structure. It clearly is here. So I am off to do some planning! Thank you all so much.

Lol. Yay me. I don't think I have a problem with taking charge but I want to be consistent. There are several good suggestions here. I think I need to think through what is best and then stick to it like glue. I do think screen time, even educational, makes school time harder. Looking forward to more ideas. Thank you so much.

I am so frustrated. In my head, we have wonderful mornings here at home. That's part of why we homeschool, right? But in reality things are much different. My nine-year-old son gets up at about seven. When he gets up all he wants to do is watch a movie. I'm not a big screen time person but somehow we've gotten into this place where he watches movies in the morning. And really I don't know what else to do with him. So he gets up at seven and wants to watch a movie and then he's hungry. My daughter, on the other hand, gets up at about nine. She just seems to need more sleep. So when she gets up she eats too. And then they start playing. I often don't want to interrupt their playtime because they're getting along so well. But then eventually they start to argue and bicker. And then when I finally suggest hey maybe we should start doing some cleaning or some school, they get really upset. I can't figure out a good way to have smooth mornings that are still relaxed. Especially when my kiddos get up at two different times. It makes it hard to have breakfast together. It makes it hard to start the school day together. And I don't know what to do with my son in those two hours while my daughter is still asleep. What I would really like is to have some kind of rhythm to our morning that isn't so rigid that we can't change it. But I don't know how to do that when my daughter seems to need so much more sleep than my son. I would love to hear from other moms about how your mornings go. This is been a real frustration for me lately and I don't know exactly why it seems so insurmountable. I would love any help or advice anyone has. It feels like it ruins our whole days when our mornings are so scattered and frustrating and disorganized. And school then is such a frustration. ETA: Oops. Meant to post this on the general education board. Sorry.

Wow. Amazing. That is what I was thinking of exactly. I think they would thrive on this. So my question is where I start? I do think, despite the fact that my son would be content doing nothing but astronomy for the next four years, that we need to get some breadth. I can easily split up biology and earth science into 3 or 4 categories but chemistry and physics intimidate the heck out of me, so I would be so grateful (even more grateful because I'm already pretty darn grateful) for some ideas there. Also I'm thinking that might should be where we start since that is where we're weakest. I also love the idea of science fair projects and I think my kiddos would get so much out of them. But they are even more intimidating. I've been inspired and daunted reading your experiences with them. I guess all I can do is tackle them when it's time. I saw somewhere else, I think, that you use IEW. Do you think TWSS would help me in teaching writing through science in this way? Just a thought. This is just so great. I have a lot of thinking and planning to do!

Bump to catch the New Zealand crowd. ;)

Even though I am new, I have spent a lot of time here reading and not posting and have been inspired, intrigued, and challenged by lewelma's posts. Also I fully support the idea of a book and maybe a consulting service. I have had questions but have hesitated to ask because it seems like you must be so busy and I felt bad. I think I am over that. ;) So here's the deal. I have a 9.5 year old boy and a 7.5 year old girl. They are both science crazy though we've never really done a formal science curriculum with them. My son is CRAZY about astronomy. He watches documentaries, looks at (his reading is weak) astronomy books and knows more about space (i.e. faculae on the sun, black holes, the Hubble telescope) than most grown ups. He also really loves botany - loves to identify plants and what they are used for. He knows some about that but would love learning more, I think. Also he has a rock collection. He knows nothing about rocks but is always wondering about them. My daughter loves mechanical stuff. She is forever taking apart vacuum cleaners or printers or whatever we can get her hands on. She doesn't know what to do with it but I think there's something there. She has a snap circuits which she loves even though it's a bit above her head. She says she wants to be a mechanic when she grows up. And she also loves learning about animals and plants. Clearly my kids are sciencey kids. We are not doing formal science right now and I would like to be. There are two things I am thinking of and I would love your advice and wisdom. One thing is that I can't decide if we should delve deeper into what they already love or if I should be working to expose them to new things, which I am also sure they would love. And how to combine them! Yikes. Also I think, because they both love science, but are somewhat reluctant writers and readers that I could really base everything around science, for example, having my son make a book about the solar system - reading, writing, spelling all right there and I think he would love it. I wonder if there is a way to do that. Or math! How I wish I could integrate that into science. Both my kids seem mathy a bit but hate workbooks and drills. If it were connected to science somehow, I think they would love it. I've never heard of anything like that though. So as I go about thinking about what to do with them, I would be so grateful for your advice. Thanks to you and anyone else who wants to help!

I kind of feel like the discussion has evolved from whether a refutation of a single statement by Hakim was appropriate into a question of how to teach history. I am unfamiliar with Core 100. Is it high school level?

Yes. This is what I am saying that I agree with and find merit in. We have to get inside the history to learn from it and guard against such atrocities in our own times.

I suppose I find there to be an important but fine distinction between suggesting that from a 21st century perspective slaves were better off enslaved (which is clearly beyond wrong in several ways) and suggesting with letters and other sources that some slaves of the time believed that they were better off enslaved or that masters, seeing the alternatives for their slaves, felt that they were providing the best alternative. There are two perspectives here that matter, as I see it - our perspective now that recognizes the intrinsic, abhorrent immorality of owning another human and the perspectives of the time which were many and varied and likely did include slaves who were content (for reasons we know were a result of an awful institution) with their lot in life. Discussing that, and why that was, and what we would have done is some of the richness of history to me. Also I had to laugh at albeto's comment about a broken vs. fixed society. Of course, there has not yet been a "fixed" society. But the brokenness of that society as seen in slavery and overt, accepted racism is what I was referring to. Anyway. All this has been quite interesting and is exercising my brain, which needed it.

So I reread it all again and again and I still find nothing overly objectionable in this response because it largely comes down to the part I quoted above. Wrong is wrong, heinous is heinous BUT how would I have fared had I been brought up in a family with slaves? Would I have recognized what was so integral and everyday in my life as the horror it was against someone's humanity? What if I had been brought up in Germany to believe that I was superior and Jews were the reason my nation was suffering? We know what we are taught and eventually many of us have the capability to see outside what we are taught to right and wrong. But I am not so swift to say that I surely would have seen right in every moral outrage that has ever happened if I were on the wrong side of it. Understanding is not making excuses or justifying. It is learning to guard against such narrowness of vision in our own lives. If I understand that there truly were slaves who were content with their lot in life then you know what? That teaches me that people can be so beaten down so far that they can't envision an alternative. It teaches me that the whole society was so broken that that might have been someone's best option. It makes me ask what do I accept today because I was born into it? What injustices am I missing? And I don't think we can answer those questions as effectively if everything is so starkly on one side of the line or the other and we have no understanding of those who came before. We can abhor their actions and still strive to understand what motivated them. Honestly I felt that after the 9/11 attacks. I felt tremendous grief at the actions that were taken and there was never any question that they were horrifying. But understanding the motives and the pain that would cause someone to do those things was necessary, but some called it unpatriotic to have any sympathy for the causes of our attackers. And I did sympathize. Life is not so black and white. Some things are just plain wrong, that doesn't mean we don't have lessons to learn from those who perpetrated the wrong. Having humility enough to wonder what I would do helps make me strong enough to stand up to injustices of all kinds. For better or worse those are my thoughts after chewing on this awhile. Flame away if you must.